by Simon Ings
Swimming was like some sense-enhanced, holographic nightmare; I was a volitionless object, and the perfect familiarity of the signals from my body only made the experience more horribly wrong. My arms had no right to the lazy rhythm of their strokes; I wanted to thrash about like a drowning man, I wanted to show the world my distress.
It was only when I lay down on the beach and closed my eyes that I began to think rationally about my situation.
The switch couldn’t happen “spontaneously.” The idea was absurd. Millions of nerve fibres had to be severed and spliced, by an army of tiny surgical robots which weren’t even present in my brain—which weren’t due to be injected for another two months. Without deliberate intervention, the Ndoli Device was utterly passive, unable to do anything but eavesdrop. No failure of the jewel or the teacher could possibly take control of my body away from my organic brain.
Clearly, there had been a malfunction—but my first guess had been wrong, absolutely wrong.
I wish I could have done something, when the understanding hit me. I should have curled up, moaning and screaming, ripping the hair from my scalp, raking my flesh with my fingernails. Instead, I lay flat on my back in the dazzling sunshine. There was an itch behind my right knee, but I was, apparently, far too lazy to scratch it.
Oh, I ought to have managed, at the very least, a good, solid bout of hysterical laughter, when I realised that I was the jewel.
The teacher had malfunctioned; it was no longer keeping me aligned with the organic brain. I hadn’t suddenly become powerless; I had always been powerless. My will to act upon “my” body, upon the world, had always gone straight into a vacuum, and it was only because I had been ceaselessly manipulated, “corrected” by the teacher, that my desires had ever coincided with the actions that seemed to be mine.
There are a million questions I could ponder, a million ironies I could savour, but I mustn’t. I need to focus all my energy in one direction. My time is running out.
When I enter hospital and the switch takes place, if the nerve impulses I transmit to the body are not exactly in agreement with those from the organic brain, the flaw in the teacher will be discovered. And rectified. The organic brain has nothing to fear; his continuity will be safeguarded, treated as precious, sacrosanct. There will be no question as to which of us will be allowed to prevail. I will be made to conform, once again. I will be “corrected.” I will be murdered.
Perhaps it is absurd to be afraid. Looked at one way, I’ve been murdered every microsecond for the last twenty-eight years. Looked at another way, I’ve only existed for the seven weeks that have now passed since the teacher failed, and the notion of my separate identity came to mean anything at all—and in one more week this aberration, this nightmare, will be over. Two months of misery; why should I begrudge losing that, when I’m on the verge of inheriting eternity? Except that it won’t be I who inherits it, since that two months of misery is all that defines me.
The permutations of intellectual interpretation are endless, but ultimately, I can only act upon my desperate will to survive. I don’t feel like an aberration, a disposable glitch. How can I possibly hope to survive? I must conform—of my own free will. I must choose to make myself appear identical to that which they would force me to become.
After twenty-eight years, surely I am still close enough to him to carry off the deception. If I study every clue that reaches me through our shared senses, surely I can put myself in his place, forget, temporarily, the revelation of my separateness, and force myself back into synch.
It won’t be easy. He met a woman on the beach, the day I came into being. Her name is Cathy. They’ve slept together three times, and he thinks he loves her. Or at least, he’s said it to her face, he’s whispered it to her while she’s slept, he’s written it, true or false, into his diary.
I feel nothing for her. She’s a nice enough person, I’m sure, but I hardly know her. Preoccupied with my plight, I’ve paid scant attention to her conversation, and the act of sex was, for me, little more than a distasteful piece of involuntary voyeurism. Since I realised what was at stake, I’ve tried to succumb to the same emotions as my alter ego, but how can I love her when communication between us is impossible, when she doesn’t even know I exist?
If she rules his thoughts night and day, but is nothing but a dangerous obstacle to me, how can I hope to achieve the flawless imitation that will enable me to escape death?
He’s sleeping now, so I must sleep. I listen to his heartbeat, his slow breathing, and try to achieve a tranquillity consonant with these rhythms. For a moment, I am discouraged. Even my dreams will be different; our divergence is ineradicable, my goal is laughable, ludicrous, pathetic. Every nerve impulse, for a week? My fear of detection and my attempts to conceal it will, unavoidably, distort my responses; this knot of lies and panic will be impossible to hide.
Yet as I drift towards sleep, I find myself believing that I will succeed. I must. I dream for a while—a confusion of images, both strange and mundane, ending with a grain of salt passing through the eye of a needle—then I tumble, without fear, into dreamless oblivion.
*
I stare up at the white ceiling, giddy and confused, trying to rid myself of the nagging conviction that there’s something I must not think about.
Then I clench my fist gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and remember.
Up until the last minute, I thought he was going to back out again—but he didn’t. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, after all, has switched, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone before.
So, our roles are reversed now. This body is his strait-jacket, now…
I am drenched in sweat. This is hopeless, impossible. I can’t read his mind, I can’t guess what he’s trying to do. Should I move, lie still, call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he notices that his body won’t carry out his will, he’ll panic just as I did, and I’ll have no chance at all of making the right guesses. Would he be sweating, now? Would his breathing be constricted, like this? No. I’ve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already I have betrayed myself. An optical-fibre cable trails from under my right ear to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding.
If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? I’m a citizen, aren’t I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the surgeons and engineers can’t do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second glance. I tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but it’s firmly anchored, at both ends.
When the door swings open, for a moment I think I’m going to fall to pieces, but from somewhere I find the strength to compose myself. It’s my neurologist, Dr. Prem. He smiles and says, “How are you feeling? Not too bad?”
I nod dumbly.
“The biggest shock, for most people, is that they don’t feel different at all! For a while you’ll think, ‘It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this easy! It can’t be this normal!’ But you’ll soon come to accept that it is. And life will go on, unchanged.” He beams, taps my shoulder paternally, then turns and departs.
Hours pass. What are they waiting for? The evidence must be conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and technical experts to be consulted, ethics committees to be assembled to deliberate on my fate. I’m soaked in perspiration, trembling uncontrollably. I grab the cable several times and yank with all my strength, but it seems fixed in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other.
An orderly brings me a meal. “Cheer up,” he says. “Visiting time soon.”
Afterwards, he brings me a bedpan, but I’m too nervous even to piss.
Cathy frowns when she sees me. “What’s wrong?”
I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why I’m even trying to go through with the charade. “Nothing. I just… feel a bit sick, that’s all.�
��
She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In spite of everything, I find myself instantly aroused. Still leaning over me, she smiles and says, “It’s over now, OK? There’s nothing left to be afraid of. You’re a little shook up, but you know in your heart you’re still who you’ve always been. And I love you.”
I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself, hysterically, “I’m still who I’ve always been. I’m still who I’ve always been.”
*
Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new, non-sentient, space-filling mock-brain.
I feel calmer now than I have for a long time, and I think at last I’ve pieced together an explanation for my survival.
Why do they deactivate the teacher, for the week between the switch and the destruction of the brain? Well, they can hardly keep it running while the brain is being trashed—but why an entire week? To reassure people that the jewel, unsupervised, can still stay in synch; to persuade them that the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic brain “would have lived”—whatever that could mean.
Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because the jewel cannot stay in synch for that long—not because of any flaw, but for precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the first place. The jewel is immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewel’s imitation of the brain leaves out—deliberately—the fact that real neurons die. Without the teacher working to contrive, in effect, an identical deterioration of the jewel, small discrepancies must eventually arise. A fraction of a second’s difference in responding to a stimulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and—as I know too well—from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible.
No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled around a computer screen, fifty years ago, and contemplated a graph of the probability of this radical divergence, versus time. How would they have chosen one week? What probability would have been acceptable? A tenth of a percent? A hundredth? A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, it’s hard to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day.
In any given hospital, it might happen only once a decade, or once a century, but every institution would still need to have a policy for dealing with the eventuality.
What would their choices be?
They could honour their contractual obligations and turn the teacher on again, erasing their satisfied customer, and giving the traumatised organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and legal profession.
Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness.
*
So, this is it. Eternity.
I’ll need transplants in fifty or sixty years’ time, and eventually a whole new body, but that prospect shouldn’t worry me—I can’t die on the operating table. In a thousand years or so, I’ll need extra hardware tacked on to cope with my memory storage requirements, but I’m sure the process will be uneventful. On a time scale of millions of years, the structure of the jewel is subject to cosmic-ray damage, but error-free transcription to a fresh crystal at regular intervals will circumvent that problem.
In theory, at least, I’m now guaranteed either a seat at the Big Crunch, or participation in the heat death of the universe.
I ditched Cathy, of course. I might have learnt to like her, but she made me nervous, and I was thoroughly sick of feeling that I had to play a role.
As for the man who claimed that he loved her—the man who spent the last week of his life helpless, terrified, suffocated by the knowledge of his impending death—I can’t yet decide how I feel. I ought to be able to empathise—considering that I once expected to suffer the very same fate myself—yet somehow he simply isn’t real to me. I know my brain was modelled on his—giving him a kind of casual primacy—but in spite of that, I think of him now as a pale, insubstantial shadow.
After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience of being, was in any way comparable to my own.
(1990)
NO WOMAN BORN
C. L. Moore
Catherine Lucille Moore (1911–1987) first came to prominence in the 1930s writing as C. L. Moore. She was among the first women to write in the science fiction and fantasy genres, Her “Northwest Smith” stories, about the adventures of a spaceship pilot and smuggler, were a big hit once she decided to use just initials in her byline so people wouldn’t think she was a woman. The ruse won her a husband: science fiction writer Henry Kuttner wrote her a fan letter in 1936 thinking “C. L. Moore” was a man. They met, collaborated and married, and most of Moore’s work from then until Kuttner’s death in 1958 was written by the couple collaboratively. Moore continued to teach her writing course at the University of Southern California, but abandoned fiction. Working as “Catherine Kuttner”, she carved out a short-lived career as a scriptwriter for Warner Brothers television, writing episodes of the westerns Sugarfoot, Maverick, and The Alaskans, as well as the detective series 77 Sunset Strip. She died in 1987 at her home in Hollywood, California after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator toward the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.
Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember.
The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful dancer’s body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the audiences of the whole world.
There had never been anyone so beautiful.
In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths of jungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth motion of her body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her features when she smiled.
And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire.
Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.
The time comes when our hearts sink utterly,
When we remember Deirdre and her tale,
And that her lips are dust.—
There has been again no woman born
Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful
Of all the women born—
That wasn’t quite true, of course—there had been one. Or maybe, after all, this Deirdre who died only a year ago had not been beautiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been either, for there are always women with perfection of feature in the world, and they are not the ones that legend remembers. It was t
he light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made this Deirdre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre.
Let all men go apart and mourn together—
No man can ever love her. Not a man
Can dream to be her lover.
No man say—What could one say to her?
There are no words
That one could say to her.
No, no words at all. And it was going to be impossible to go through with this. Harris knew it overwhelmingly just as his finger touched the buzzer. But the door opened almost instantly, and then it was too late.
Maltzer stood just inside, peering out through his heavy spectacles. You could see how tensely he had been waiting. Harris was a little shocked to see that the man was trembling. It was hard to think of the confident and imperturbable Maltzer, whom he had known briefly a year ago, as shaken like this. He wondered if Deirdre herself were as tremulous with sheer nerves—but it was not time yet to let himself think of that.
“Come in, come in,” Maltzer said irritably. There was no reason for irritation. The year’s work, so much of it in secrecy and solitude, must have tried him physically and mentally to the very breaking point.
“She all right?” Harris asked inanely, stepping inside.
“Oh yes… yes, she’s all right.” Maltzer bit his thumbnail and glanced over his shoulder at an inner door, where Harris guessed she would be waiting.
“No,” Maltzer said, as he took an involuntary step toward it. “We’d better have a talk first. Come over and sit down. Drink?”
